


Perchance to Dream

by PitViperOfDoom



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Fae & Fairies, Fairy Tale Curses, M/M, Queerplatonic Relationships, Rescue Your Beloved(s), Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 13:07:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29436525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PitViperOfDoom/pseuds/PitViperOfDoom
Summary: When the curse descended upon the kingdom, those he loved were stolen away. Each night, Tim enters the fairy realm in his dreams and fights for their freedom.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Gerard Keay/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Tim Stoker, Sasha James & Tim Stoker
Comments: 7
Kudos: 104
Collections: TMA Valentine's Exchange 2021





	Perchance to Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bisexualoftheblade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bisexualoftheblade/gifts).



> Happy Valentine's Day! Have a polycule fairy tale!
> 
> Warnings: Blood, fairy tale violence, Mary Keay's usual nonsense.

He stands amid ruin and corpses, so battered and blood-soaked that he can no longer tell how much of it is his and how much is not. The light and music flashes on, bright and deafening in a twisted mockery of a riotous festival, but all that matters now is the hand he grips in his own. He holds it, and it holds him back, and the eternity that he’s spent fighting to reach it falls from his shoulders.

An army of stretched and grinning faces still blocks the way, dressed and painted in garish colors, but he raises his sword. He has her now, and that means he can reach the others, too. Just a little longer, a little farther, and then—

She pulls him close, and he feels her breath against his ear.

“ _Wake up, Tim._ ”

He doesn’t want to— _he can’t, not yet, not when he’s come so far—_ but the bright and spinning world falls away, and he opens his eyes to the darkened ceiling of his room in the inn.

He’s out of bed in an instant, racing downstairs without a sound. He saddles his horse and rides deep into the forest, to the empty, thorn-choked castle nestled at its heart. It’s not far; the moon is still high when he reaches it, ties his mount to a post, and races up the steps of the highest tower.

Sasha meets him halfway. Bright-eyed, beautiful, and  _awake_ .

She flies into his arms so quickly that he almost falls back down the stairs. Her hair smells of dust and herbs, the scent as sharp and bright as the life returned.

“You did it,” she whispers. “You woke me.”

His heart is pulled in two directions: up, for the joy of their reunion, and down, when he remembers what he hasn’t done yet. “I did,” he whispers back. “But why did you wake _me?_ I could have found the others, they were so _close_ —”

“No,” she says quietly, as if it breaks her heart to tell him this. “They weren’t.”

“But I found you!”

“I know you did! And you did  _ wonderfully _ .” Her hand brushes softly against his face. “But you came down without an anchor, you nearly died to get that far, and you still only breached the first layer.” She must see the confusion on his face, because she smiles sadly and tugs him back up the stairs.

The room in the highest tower has always been hers. Before the curse it was a mad and cluttered place, full of books and plants and colored glass containers filled with all manner of things, the perfect place for a witch to make her home.

For months, dust has choked out the smell of old books and dried plants. The herbs are stale, the instruments unpolished, the hum of magic silent. Only now is it beginning to return.

The bed in the corner is rumpled and unmade. It is the only thing that has seen use since the curse began, and it still lies beneath a layer of barely-disturbed dust. Sasha never moved in the months she spent locked in enchanted sleep.

She sits at her desk now, pulling Tim down to sit with her. “How much do you know about the curse?” she asks.

“The king made deals with fairies,” Tim replies. “And when he couldn’t pay his debts, they cursed all of you to sleep forever.”

“Not all of us,” Sasha tells him. “They didn’t mean to take me. I followed.”

It robs him of words for a few moments. “You’re  _ mad _ ,” he tells her fondly.

“So you’ve said. How did you find us?”

“The king fled after the curse took hold,” he answers. “The castle was abandoned. I came back and broke into his chambers, and found the sleeping draughts he used to visit them. And I took one.” He can see her disapproval in her face, but he refuses to be cowed into regret, even by her. He would do it again— _ will _ do it again. He won’t stop until he’s finished.

“So you fought your way through the fairy-dream and found me,” she says, deep in thought. “You’re very lucky you weren’t killed.”

“What would have happened if I had?”

“Without an anchor? You would have died in this world as well. It was foolish to go alone.”

“What anchor?” Tim asks bluntly. “I have no family left. Everything I love was in that dream. There was nothing to tie me here.”

She kisses his forehead, and tears well up in his eyes. He _missed_ her, and having her back reminds him of how much he misses the others. “You’ll be going back, then?” she asks.

“You know I have to.”

“I do. And I care about them too.” She dries his tears gently. “Not the way you do. But I won’t leave them, either.”

“Thank you,” he whispers.

“Don’t thank me yet. It won’t be any easier. In fact, it will be even harder from now on. You’ll have to go deeper into the fairy-dream, until you find who sleeps at the heart of it. I can wake you up if you’re killed, but you’ll have to start over every time.” She cradles his tired face between her hands. “You were amazing, fighting your way to me like that. But I was the easiest to find.”

“I know you,” he says with a weary smile. “You were probably fighting your way out already.”

The smile she returns is sharp and bitter. “I was _ lucky. _ None of the fairies had much interest in me, and it frustrated them when I resisted their torment. In the end, they threw me into one of their revels and hoped I’d lose my mind that way. You reached me in time.”

“You resisted their torment?” he asks, only half believing her.

“Fairies are clever creatures, but not half as clever as they think they are,” she says with a roll of her eyes. “They have so little imagination. Even before they gave up on me, they tried to make  _ me _ do all the hard work of tormenting myself, but they went about it all wrong.”

Anger lights the core of him. “What did they do to you?”

“They appealed to love,” she says, kissing his brow again. “Your love for me, and for the others. They tried to twist it into a nightmare for me.”

In spite of himself, he snorts with amusement. “They tried to make you _ jealous? _ ”

“It’s what they know,” she says, laughter lines darkening around her eyes. “If they can tell the difference at all, they think it’s less. They can know all they like, but they will never _understand_.”

* * *

He brings her the stolen sleeping draught, and she airs out her dusty tower room and sets to work making more. At night, Tim goes to sleep while she sits at his bedside, and he fights his way through the fairy-dream once more.

Again and again he is cut down, and he wakes in Sasha’s arms with tears in his eyes and blood in his teeth.

But with each attempt, he learns. He memorizes every inch of the twisted revelry, until knowledge of his foes is carved into his mind, into his muscles, into his very bones. When he finally cuts through the last of them and reaches the stone table at the center, the fairy-dream at last relents and pulls him deeper.

The festival vanishes, and with it all the light and color and music. At first the muted gray and dark, earthy tones of his new surroundings are a relief for his streaming eyes, but before long they begin to choke him.

He knows where he is, the moment he sees the infinite shelves of books that whisper and plead for help, for mercy, for freedom, for an end to the torment. He knows these tomes with pages that cut, with covers and bindings far too soft to be leather, with words that read you back. He knows it because he’s heard it spoken of in the dead of night, in the wake of nightmares he could never truly understand before now.

And because of that, he knows where he is, and who he will find here, even before the first book flies open and sends its horrors pouring out to him.

The first night he dreams of Mary Keay’s library, the things within the books tear him apart before he can even call his love’s name. He wakes screaming in Sasha’s arms, and she holds him the way he always held Gerry.

He does not count his attempts; to know the number would be less than useless. But eventually he makes his way through—past the revel, down into the library, and through the whispering, screaming shelves to where their master waits.

Mary Keay is not a fairy who cares much for beauty. Power is her vanity, and she wears it like a queen’s mantle. Instead of a sword she wields a pen, its silver tip gleaming and impossibly sharp as she writes on stretched parchment-skin that still pulses with pale blue veins.

Her inkwell never runs empty, not with her son bleeding into it like a waterfall.

Sasha had looked on Tim with joy, once her eyes had cleared of madness from the revel. But when Gerry raises his head, all Tim sees on his face is bleak dismay.

“You shouldn’t be here.” Gerry has always been pale, easily burned in summer. Now his skin is white as paper, except for the deep bruises beneath his eyes. “You need to get out of here.”

“No.”

“If you love me,” Gerry tells him, “You’ll leave me, and you won’t come back.”

Mary kills him with a smile on her face, and Tim wakes up with Gerry’s anguished scream ringing in his ears.

He wishes there was a way to rescue him that didn’t hurt him so much. He knows what it’s like to look on helplessly as those he loves are ripped from him; the cruelest thing he can do to them is die while they look on helplessly.

But he is still alive, and Sasha is there to guide him. When he tells her of Mary Keay’s library, she smiles and tucks a stone into his pocket the next time he falls asleep. A good luck charm, he thinks. Something special and magical, like the adder-stone she gifted him when they were younger.

Then he steps into the library, with all its wooden shelves and books of paper and parchment and less savory things. He draws out the stone and sees it for what it is: a chunk of flint.

It’s so much easier not to fight his way through. When he sets her precious library alight, Mary Keay comes to him.

She nearly kills him again, for all the good it would have done. But he is stubborn, and he is not alone. First Sasha’s fire eats through her library, and then her own words—arrogantly, greedily written in her son’s spilled blood—rebel against her. Tim strikes her down while the grim library burns, then walks into the heart of the flames where the first of his lovers sits.

Gerry presses into his arms, grasping and seeking, the way he always does when lost in the lingering horror of bad dreams. He has always craved comfort, even what scant comfort Tim could offer when that horror was so far beyond his understanding. But now they both kneel in the depths of the same nightmare as it burns down around them.

Tim can see the mists rolling in. He can feel the downward pull of the fairy-dream as it draws him down to the next layer. He has a fair idea of who waits for him there.

He will have to wait a little longer for him. Just a little.

Tim presses his lips to the shell of Gerry’s ear. “It’s time to wake up,” he whispers, and Gerry sobs with desperate relief.

When Sasha draws him back, he struggles out of her arms, out of bed. Without a word, he throws himself down the stairs from her tower room.

The highest room in the castle’s west wing has always been a place of light. An abundance of glass windows keeps it bright, especially in the evenings when its occupant does his best work. For when it isn’t, there is a fireplace, and stacks of cherrywood still unburned. Since the curse fell upon the castle, the fireplace has been cold and the windows clouded. Half-finished canvases gather dust in the corners, the vivid paints long since dried and hardened in their jars.

Tim finds Gerry there, which is not strange. Gerry has been in his room since the curse began, just as Sasha had been in hers.

But now he sits up in bed, wide-awake and dazed and painfully hopeful, until his eyes fall upon Tim and his uncertainty fades away.

“Don’t ever do that again,” Gerry tells him. Tim kisses him instead of answering, because he has never been in the business of making promises he won’t keep.

They lie together for the rest of the night, and Gerry holds Tim close as he tries not to shake apart.

* * *

Gerry sleeps the following night, deep and dreamless after months of torment. The bruises beneath his eyes are still fading when Tim kisses him before returning to Sasha’s tower, and to the fairy-dream.

He is sick of fighting the revel, as bitter and hateful of their mocking smiles as he was when he first pulled Sasha from their clutches. But he has no choice, not when it still stands between him and what he loves.

Mary Keay’s library still fights him when he finally reaches it. He had hoped its master’s defeat would tame it, but now her power runs rampant. She is not dead but merely vanquished, and her fury is soaked into the wood pulp, into the bindings, into every drop of ink. The shelves no longer whisper; they _scream_.

He makes it halfway to the heart of the place before Sasha has to pull him free of the dream again. It happens again the next night, and the night after that as well. Each night he gets closer, but never close enough.

“You can’t keep doing this.” Gerry holds his face between his hands. It’s been less than a week since he woke up, and his face is still so pale and gaunt, his eyes shadowed and haunted. Tim knows that he looks little better. “Wait for me. Just a few more days, and I can go back into the dream with you.”

“ _No._ ” Tim grips his hands. The memory hangs before his eyes as if from a noose, of Gerry kneeling with dead eyes as Mary bleeds him into an inkwell. “You’ve suffered enough. I can do this. I promise, I’ll get them both back.”

The following night he carves his way through the revel, and his hands are still bloody when Mary’s library tries to tear him apart again.

He wields Sasha’s flint with as much ferocity as he would a sword. Shadows dance on the walls as flames creep into the dream, brighter and stronger than ever before. The books scream again, not in fury but in terror, as the fire rises up and lights his way forward.

It comes in many colors, lighting up the library in a painter’s palette of flame. Instead of acrid burning, it smells like plant dyes and cherrywood smoke.

Finally the dream pulls him deeper, and he leaves the fire and the library behind and plunges into bitter cold. The shock of it is so sudden and blinding that he thinks he might be underwater, but then he opens his eyes to a silver-white haze, feels the ground beneath his feet, and realizes that he is surrounded by mists, not an ocean. It stretches on and on in every direction; no matter which way he walks, the dream looks the same. He tries to strike his flint again, but the sparks sputter out as soon as they appear.

And so he walks.

He wanders lost through the fog, stirring it and drinking it in with each breath. There is no direction here, no straight lines, no east or west or north or south or up or down. There is only the cold that seeps into his bones, into his veins, into his heart. It slows his pulse, weakening it until he can barely feel it flutter beneath his ribs.

And then he is awake, and his heart is warm and pounding again, and Sasha’s hand against his face is so hot it burns.

“We almost lost you.” Gerry’s hands clasp his, not as hot as Sasha’s but still warm.

“I was alright,” Tim answers through chilled, numbed lips. “I wasn’t in danger. I wasn’t even fighting anything.”

“Your heart stopped beating,” Sasha tells him, her eyes bright. “You nearly froze to death in your sleep.”

They’re afraid. He is afraid too, but his own fear feels far away. Maybe the mists have numbed it, or maybe the months he spent alone have ground it into a hardened scab.

“I can’t leave them,” he says.

His eyes are on Gerry. Gerry, who is still exhausted and haunted from months of unending torment. Gerry, who can’t bear to sleep alone anymore, even if it means curling up with one of their still-unconscious lovers. Gerry, who wants them back as desperately as Tim does. They may be together again, but they are incomplete.

“I can’t lose you too,” Gerry whispers.

“You won’t. I’ll come back every time. I promise.”

Tim is not in the business of making promises that he won’t keep.

The next time he walks in the fog, there is a change in the blank haze that surrounds him. Instead of uniform silver-white in every direction, this time there are colors dancing through the cold. He smells fresh paint and cherrywood smoke, and his trembling lips smile. He is not alone. When he strikes his flint, the sparks dart through the streaks of color and set them aglow. The warmth never lasts long, but he can feel it while it is there.

He walks with purpose now. He feels the memory of a hand holding his, guiding him through the fairy-dream.

And at its heart, at last, he finds him.

Martin is even paler than Gerry had been, his dark hair faded, his skin nearly translucent. Tim can see him breathing, but no warm clouds form by his lips. His cloak is damp; the colorful guiding lights sparkle on the tiny droplets caught in the fabric.

Martin does not kneel, or flee, or cower. There is no one guarding him, nothing tethering or trapping him but the endless void of silver-white all around. There does not need to be; Sasha said that the fairy-dream torments and traps its captives, and Martin both hates and craves solitude and silence. Even now he stands motionless, eyes downcast and unblinking as if Tim isn’t even there.

“Oh. You’re here.” It’s been so long since he heard Martin’s voice, and Tim hates the mists for muffling it even now.

Gerry’s colors and Sasha’s light have bought him time, but even now Tim can feel his own heartbeat slow. He doesn’t have time to go further, as much as it tears at him to give up now, when he’s so close.

His hands are nearly numb, but Martin’s face still feels cold against them. Martin is immovable, his eyes fixed on something Tim cannot see. “Martin,” he says. “You have to wake—”

Martin’s hand is like ice against his lips, pressing his mouth shut. “No,” Martin tells him. “I can’t leave. Not yet.”

“Martin, _please_ —”

“Maybe never,” Martin says. “I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t leave.”

He still won’t look at him. Frustrated, Tim steps in front of him, intent on making him _see_ him, only for Martin to hold him at arm’s length, as immovable as a glacier.

“I can’t leave,” Martin says again. Tears freeze as they fall, crystalizing on his face like tiny diamonds. Not once does he blink. “Tim, I can’t leave.”

Tim takes in his face, pale and translucent and shining with ice-cold tears, eyes lowered and staring—

Not just staring, but _seeing_.

Tim turns around and follows his gaze.

At first, he sees nothing but the pale gray expanse, shot through with the wisps of color that guided him. But he continues to look, never blinking even when his eyes sting in the cold. And the longer he looks, the more he realizes that he can see, too. The mists part for him—or perhaps it is more accurate that he sees _through_ them.

Below them, beneath the freezing, stifling fog, Tim can see the next domain of the fairy-dream. And as he looks, the fairy-dream looks back.

It is _all eyes_. And at the heart of them, staring up from the depths of his prison—

“ _Jon!_ ” The mists snatch his scream from his lips, dampening it to a pitiful whimper. He almost pitches forward—jumping? falling?—into the hungry, staring pit, and only Martin’s frigid hand in his keeps him where he is.

He is so very cold.

“The deepest layer of the fairy-dream,” Martin whispers, staring down at the one they love. In this place, a whisper is easier to hear than a scream. “The heart of the curse.”

“What’s down there?” Tim asks with lips that can barely move.

“Every part of the fairy-dream can be seen from the center, except for the center itself,” Martin answers. “It watches, but it cannot be watched, any more than an eye can see itself. That’s where Jon is.”

“But I _can_ see him. We can both see him!”

“Yes.” Frozen tears fall from Martin’s face, vanishing into the mists at their feet. “Before it took him, I looked at him, and I saw him, and he saw me. And as long as I don’t look away, that won’t change.” He squeezes Tim’s hand tight enough to be painful, but Tim has long gone numb. “If I lose sight of him, I won’t find him again. No one will. So I can’t leave. I’m so sorry, Tim. I can’t leave him.”

Tim can feel the pull, not the fairy-dream pulling him down, but Sasha pulling him up. “I’ll be back for you,” he says—tries to say, with a mouth that won’t obey him. “I’m not leaving you, either of you, I’ll be back, and I’ll get him out, and we’ll all go home, do you hear me, Martin?”

“Wake up, Tim,” Martin whispers, and Tim’s first breath in the waking world _burns_.

* * *

Sasha holds him until the tears finally subside. By the time Tim can breathe again, he feels wrung out and drained. Sleeping has never been so exhausting before.

“He was dead on his feet, trying to help,” she tells him when he realizes that Gerry isn’t there. “I sent him off to rest, though I don’t know where he went.”

She forces him to eat first, and eventually Tim finds him. It isn’t difficult; there are only two places in the castle where he might be.

The little bedroom by the kitchens, once kept warm by the nearby ovens, has only one sleeping body in the bed. In the room next to the library, there are two.

Gerry holds Jon’s sleeping form close beneath the blankets. Tim looks upon their love’s face, remembers how he looked in the fairy-dream ( _trapped, held fast, drowning in eyes upon eyes upon eyes, silent and pleading from his prison_ ) and gives in to the desire to crawl in with them. He thinks guiltily of Martin, alone in his room by the deserted kitchen. There’s no use in thinking like that, not when neither Martin nor Jon are aware of what happens to their bodies in the waking world. But even with three of them huddled together in the same bed, Tim feels Martin’s absence like a missing limb.

“Sorry I had to leave,” Gerry whispers, as if there’s any danger of waking Jon, as if Gerry wouldn’t give anything to drag him from his unending dream.

“You helped me find Martin,” Tim answers. “Jon, too.”

“You were so cold.”

“I know. Wasn’t a very nice place, that dream.”

“Mm.”

Tim brushes a few errant strands of hair out of Gerry’s face, slipping it behind his ear with a gentle caress. “It’ll be over soon. I’ll have them both out next time.”

Gerry nods. “Jon’s at the center, isn’t he.”

Tim doesn’t ask how he knows that. Gerry’s fey blood is fickle, a curse one moment and a boon the next. “Martin’s got him. He won’t let him get lost. Neither will I.”

Instead of answering, Gerry curls more tightly around them both.

Tim arms himself as best he can that night, with Sasha’s flint stone in his pocket, along with a lock of Gerry’s hair and a sachet of Martin’s favorite tea. When he slips into the dream and finds himself in the revel once more, he braces himself for a long night of fighting.

He is tired. He has slept through every night since he first tasted the sleeping draught, and not once has he wrung a single drop of rest from it.

He carves his way through the revel and burns his way through the library, hands blistered and bloodied from wielding weapons, flint, and fire. When he plunges into the ice-cold fog, he lifts the sachet to his nose, and lets the smell of tea and comfort and home warm him through it.

The colors don’t guide him this time, but he pays little mind to the absence. He knows the way now, and he doesn’t need his hand held. The mists cling to him, but he shakes them off and presses on.

Martin is exactly where he left him, standing on the precipice and staring into the heart of the curse. Tim does not try to turn his head this time, nor compel him to look him in the eye. Instead he presses the sachet, with all the warmth that still clings to it, into Martin’s cold hand. Numb blue lips twitch, nearly forming a smile.

“Came back, didn’t I?” Tim laces their fingers together, the sachet pressed between their palms. Below them, Jon holds Martin’s gaze like the lifeline it is. Eyes glare all around him, on him, within him, until Tim’s stomach turns.

He doesn’t want to go further. He doesn’t want to descend into that place of pain and cruelty and lidless eyes. But what he wants are his loves back, his life back, and an end to the curse that torments them. And he can’t have one without the other.

Now isn’t the time to be weak. Jon has been down there for months, enduring, with nothing but a distant view of Martin to keep him from being lost forever. Tim can endure a few minutes of it, if it means wrenching him back.

He is so very, very tired.

He steps forward, his grasp on Martin’s hand loosens—

—and another hand holds him back.

“No,” Gerry tells him, as the mists around them light up in pastels and jewel tones. “No, that’s enough. No more.”

“You shouldn’t be here.” He would be shouting if he were awake, but this place wasn’t meant for noise, and he can’t muster the strength try. It’s so cold, and he’s so tired. The last thing he ever wanted was Gerry following him back into this hell. Beside him, Martin silently weeps.

“Sorry I’m late,” Gerry says, as if Tim hadn’t spoken. “I had to wait for Sasha to brew up more of the draught.” His hands are still warm as they grip Tim’s. Martin gasps when Gerry’s fingers curl around the hand that Tim still holds. “Stay here with Martin. Keep each other warm. I’ll get him out, I promise.”

“I can do this,” Tim pleads. “Just let me do this for you.”

“I know you can,” is the gentle reply. “You’ve done so much for us already.” The kiss comes without warning, too quickly for Tim to return it. “But you’re tired, aren’t you?”

He is. He just wants to rest.

“You don’t have to do everything yourself.” Gerry’s voice is so tender and fond that it hurts to listen to. “You got us this far. I can make it the rest of the way.”

Tears scald their way down his face. “You’ve suffered so much.”

“I know. But you have, too.”

Without warning, Martin’s grip on his hand tightens. “I’ve got him,” he says. “I’ll look after him.”

Gerry smiles, crooked and imperfect and beautiful. “Good.”

Martin smiles back, slow and cracking like he’s forgotten how. “Get our Jon back.”

Gerry lets go, and Tim watches him fall into the heart of the curse. He holds Martin close, and doesn’t blink.

* * *

Tim is on his feet as soon as his eyes are open, only to go temporarily blind when the blood rushes from his head. Sasha forces him to sit back down, half-scolding him all the while, but he only half-listens. As soon as his vision clears, he downs the tonic she presses into his hand and races down the stairs from her tower room.

The kitchens are the closest. Tim is nearly at the door to the little bedroom nearest to them when it swings open from the inside.

Martin is still a little pale, with dried tear tracks shimmering faintly on his face. But his hair is rich and dark the way it never was in the dream, and the color is creeping back into his face. Tim closes the distance at a run and all but flings himself into Martin’s waiting arms.

He is _warm_. Tim peppers his face with kisses just to be sure.

“Jon?” Tim gasps out.

“I didn’t take my eyes off of him,” Martin answers, all forced brightness with an undercurrent of uncertainty. “Not until we were both free.”

“Come on.” Tim grasps his hand again, and the two of them turn toward the library.

The door is already open, waiting for their arrival. Martin pulls him inside, and Tim barely breathes at all before he has Jon in his sights.

Gerry sits upright amid tangled sheets. Jon is curled up in his arms, his head tucked beneath Gerry’s chin as he watches them with bright, awake eyes.

It’s a glorious sight, and it only lasts until Tim’s eyes blur with tears. He stumbles forward, half-blind, and before he can blink the tears away, he’s in the middle of all three of them.

“I saw you.” Jon’s voice is raspy from disuse, but his hands are steady around Tim’s tear-streaked face. “The whole time, I was—they were watching, and I could see everything they did, I couldn’t _not_ —”

“I’m sorry you had to wait so long,” Tim sobs.

“No,” Martin murmurs into his hair. “No, you did so well.”

“You were beautiful,” Jon says in a hushed voice. “And you got us out, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t do it alone, I _couldn’t_ —”

“Damn right you couldn’t.” Sasha stands in the doorway, leaning against it as she watches their reunion. Tim laughs through his tears. She’s as brilliant and beautiful as ever. He couldn’t have done it without her, not in a thousand years.

“Is it over?” Martin asks her.

“It’s over,” she replies. “The curse is broken, and the dream is ended. That dream, at least. The old king’s debt is paid.” Tim tries to listen, but it gets harder to cling to her words with each passing second.

So too does consciousness.

“Tim?” Jon’s voice sounds distant, pitched with concern. “Are you alright?”

“He’s fine,” Gerry assures him, warm and fond. “He just needs sleep—proper sleep, this time.”

Tim struggles against it, but it’s a losing battle. He can’t sleep yet, not when he just got them back.

It’s Martin who kisses him, smoothing the frown line between his eyebrows. “It’s alright, Tim,” he says. “We’re alright. We’re here, and we’re not going anywhere ever again.”

Jon’s rough, scarred hands curl into his. “We’ll be here when you wake up,” he says.

“Just rest,” says Gerry. “Remember? We’ll take it from here.”

The curse is over, but the rest is not. When he wakes, he will cling to them and never let go again. They will ask and answer the important questions about today, and the more difficult questions about tomorrow.

For now, he closes his tired eyes and drifts off, surrounded by what he loves.

He does not dream.


End file.
